Isabella's Quantum Boogaloo
by RockSunner
Summary: Isabella has her own side time-travel trips during the Quantum Boogaloo episode. This is the untold story.
1. Chapter 1

**Isabella's Quantum Boogaloo**

Isabella had her own adventures in time in the Quantum Boogaloo episode. This is the untold story. Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in Phineas and Ferb.

* * *

Isabella was on a time-travel journey with Phineas and Ferb, going twenty years into the future for a tool that would fuse wood and metal at the molecular level. She was no stranger to time travel. Once before she had supervised the building of a replacement time machine to rescue the brothers and their sister Candice from the late Cretaceous period. The Fireside Girls manual had been a great help, of course. It had information about absolutely everything.

It was that same time machine that they were using to visit the future, with an additional fix by Ferb to provide self-contained power, just in case the power sources of the future weren't compatible with the ones they used in the present.

Now she sat in the time machine in the Science Museum of the future, minding it for Phineas. "He trusts me," she said with a happy sigh, just as she accidentally leaned on the machine's lever. With a spiraling swirl the machine disappeared back in time.

* * *

A Viking in a ceremonial horned helmet planted a flag in the ground. "I claim this land in the name of Leif Erickson!" he said with a Swedish accent.

The other Vikings cheered.

At that moment Isabella and the time machine appeared right in front of him. He gave a startled jump, and the horned helmet fell from his head and into Isabella's lap.

All the Vikings ran, until Leif called to his men, "Hold! By Odin, we are no cowards! How can we let a small elf in a magic sleigh frighten us? Charge!"

The other Vikings cheered again, and charged with leveled spears.

Isabella fumbled with the time machine controls. "I've got to get out of here!"

Suddenly a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer flew down. Inside were two elves named Blay'n and Clewn't.

"Stop bad-mouthing elves and magic sleighs, or we'll put you on the naughty list!' Blay'n shouted.

The Vikings ran away as fast as they could, and Isabella managed to pull the lever, again without clearly setting where she was going.

* * *

The barren plain looked about the same as before, except for a herd of mastodons grazing nearby. As Isabella watched them, a Cro-Magnon man slipped out from behind a rock and approached her curiously.

"Oooh-gaah?" he said to her.

"Me... Isabella," she said, pointing to herself.

"Me... Conk," he said. He seemed to be very clever at picking up words like "me."

Isabella wanted to make friends, and she happened to have a cheese sandwich along. (She always carried them to feed her dog Pinky.)

She mimed eating and offered the sandwich to Conk. "Conk hungry? Sandwich."

"Sandwich," he said. He wolfed the sandwich down and looked to her for more.

She showed empty hands sadly. "No more sandwiches. No more food."

Conk pointed at a nearby mammoth. "Conk hungry. Isabella hungry? Food!"

Conk picked up his club and sneaked up on the mammoth. Just as he tried to hit it with the club, the enormous beast brought one of its tusks down on his head, clobbering him. He staggered away. The mammoth continued to graze.

Isabella had an idea. She picked up a turtle that was wandering by and showed Conk how to wear it on his head as a helmet, just as Phineas had described himself and his siblings doing when riding a scooter in the time of the dinosaurs.

Conk put the turtle on his own head and tested it by whacking himself on the top of the head several times with his club. Satisfied, he attacked the mammoth again.

This time the tip of the animal's tusk broke off when it hit the hard surface of the turtle's shell. The mammoth ran from Conk, trumpeting in fear. Conk ran after it.

"Goodbye, Conk," Isabella called after him. "Watch out for glaciers."

She tried to operate the machine to return to the far future, but the lever was stuck and wouldn't go that far. She looked at the mechanism and discovered that the broken tusk had fallen into the machine and jammed it. She pulled it out, but the damage was still a problem.

"Now I have to get this fixed," she said to herself. "But where can I go to find help to repair a time machine?"

She remembered the 19th century inventor Xavier Onassis. His laboratory had been on the exact spot where the Science Museum stood. In fact, it was because of his leaving his unfinished machine to science that the museum was established there. The damaged machine could travel that far, at least. Isabella set the machine and pulled the lever again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Isabella's time machine arrived in a cluttered laboratory workshop. There was a crushing sound as it landed on scattered parts and tools. Off to one side was another time machine that looked identical to hers.

"I've been lucky so far," Isabella thought. "I'll be careful in the future where, or rather when, I put the time machine."

The inventor rushed into the room, "My goodness! Who are you? You have come from the future with my completed time machine to show me?"

"Hello, Mr. Onassis," Isabella said. "I'm Isabella Garcia-Shapiro. No, this isn't your time machine. Yours was never completed. My friends and I built this one with information from the Fireside Girls Handbook, along a few notes and drawings of your machine. Well, at first it was a tie machine, but we quickly fixed the spelling error and made it work."

"I'm glad my machine will be of some use, even though I never finish it," Mr. Onassis said. "I was about to give up and leave the country. I've written out a document leaving my incomplete machine to science, and asking that they found a science museum on this spot. That happened by your time, I hope?"

"Yes, yes it did," Isabella said.

"Excellent. Now, what may I do for you while you're here in the past?"

"I came for help in fixing my time machine. The lever is stuck and I can't get all the way back to the future. I went into the far past first and brought back this Viking helmet and this wooly mammoth tusk. But the tusk got stuck in the gears and jammed them."

She produced the two time souvenirs and he took them for a closer look. He looked at both with a magnifying glass, especially inside the helmet. Then he rushed the helmet over to his wood stove and dropped it into a pot of boiling water. After a thorough boiling he returned the dripping helmet to her.

"Why did you do that?" Isabella asked sharply.

"I'm afraid I have bad news," he said. "There are small pieces of skin on the inner rim of the helmet that show signs of smallpox. If you've been carrying it around with you there's a high likelihood that you're infected."

"That could be bad, right?"

"Very. Smallpox can kill you, or scar you for life. They have just begun vaccinations for it in my time. Hopefully in your time you've been inoculated."

"I'm afraid not. Smallpox was eradicated in my time, so they don't inoculate for it any more." Isabella said. She had learned this fact while earning her Knowledge of Eradicated Diseases Achievement Patch.

"Then you must travel to a time where they have the vaccine and get some immediately."

"I will, once you help me fix my time machine."

"I'd be happy to help, but I would like a couple of things in return."

"Yes?"

"First, a chance to look at your Fireside Girls Handbook. I'm curious how to make a time machine that really works."

"Well, normally only Fireside Girls are allowed to look at it... but they haven't been founded yet so I can make you an honorary member. What's the second thing?"

"Please bring me some lunch while you're in the future. Inventing is hungry work."

With the tools and parts available in the workshop the forward gears were quickly repaired. Isabella swore in Mr. Onassis as an honorary Fireside Girl and taught him the song: "We're Fireside Girls, one and all, and together we belong..."

"Now you can read the Time Travel section while I go get the vaccine," she said. "And lunch."

Mr. Onassis nodded, deep into his reading. "Aha! Ingenious. I wouldn't have thought of that..."

* * *

Isabella timed her return to the museum carefully. It was the day they first traveled in time, before she and the other Fireside Girls saw the message written in the fossilized dinosaur footprint that told them Phineas needed to be rescued. At that point the other time machine wasn't in the museum and there was no danger of crushing it.

Isabella moved cautiously through the museum to avoid being seen by her past self, heading for the Medical Exhibit. Just as she remembered, there was a test tube containing a sample of smallpox vaccine there. She looked around to make sure no guards were watching, then she took it. She felt bad about stealing from a museum exhibit, but it wasn't as serious an offense as yelling. She planned to return it again once she used it.

Next stop was the museum's Slushy Dawg stand. "Hi Jeremy," she said to the young man operating the stand.

"Hi Isabella. You haven't seen Candice, have you? She was acting a bit weird and I'm worried about her."

"No, not recently. I'd like two Slushy Dawgs, please." (She was starting to get a bit hungry herself.)

"Coming right up," Jeremy said.

* * *

Isabella arrived back at the workshop of Mr. Onassis with the familiar swirl of colors and sound effects.

"Hi, Mr. Onassis. I have the vaccine and the food."

Mr. Onassis looked up from his work. "Thank you, Isabella."

He took a Slushy Dawg and ate it with gusto. "This is scrumptious! What do they call these delicacies of the future?"

"Corn dogs."

"I would very much like to go to a time where these corn dogs are available. And thanks to you, I can."

"What do you mean?"

"Using the information from your Handbook I have completed my own time machine. What would be a good date in the future to visit? How about the day you started from?"

"That would work, if you go there after we're gone."

Isabella gave him the date of the tool-getting mission, and a time after which they should be gone.

"You won't land on the exact spot where my time machine was anyway," she said. "Yours is off to the side of mine."

"I could if I wanted to," Mr. Onassis said. "My machine can move in both space and time. Actually, it's harder to make a machine that stays in the same spot. The Earth rotates and moves through space, you know."

Mr. Onassis showed her the hidden controls for moving the machine in space. Just for fun, he set his machine to appear in the same place hers was now. He got into the machine.

"There's a little trouble with the calibration of the lever for backward hops," he said. "If a person doesn't know what he's doing he'll arrive one month later than expected. But that's not a problem because I don't intend to return."

"What?" Isabella asked. "B-but..."

"I want to live in a time where they have those delicious corn dogs," he told her. "Ta-ta now!"

With that, he pulled the lever and vanished.

Isabella was horrified. She had messed up time. With no old time machine in the museum, what would happen to the time-travel she had already experienced? What was she going to do now?


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Isabella tried to think what to do. She could try staying in the past long enough to build a duplicate time machine to leave behind, but that would take a long while without help. She lacked supplies and her modern money would be no good here. Besides, she only knew how to build a machine with an external power supply. There were no electrical outlets in the workshop, so clearly the machine Mr. Onassis used had self-contained power.

She had to go and get Phineas and Ferb or they would be stranded in the future. Finally she had an idea. She took the time machine forward to the museum of the future. Phineas and Ferb were there waiting.

"Isabella, I thought I said to stay in the time machine," said Phineas.

"I did. It's the time machine that moved. I brought back a woolly mammoth's tusk, a Viking helmet, and smallpox... and the vaccine," Isabella said, showing her souvenirs.

She felt guilty about not telling the whole truth, since she had left the machine for a few minutes to get the vaccine and corn dogs at the museum, but mentioning that would require explaining about Mr. Onassis and the time machine that no longer existed in the past. She didn't want Phineas to try to fix it and end up endangering his own time-line. This was something she would have to do on her own.

"Cool. Let's make like a banana and invert our molecules through the space-time continuum," said Phineas.

Back in the present, they ran into Candace and Mrs. Flynn-Fletcher. Candace was clearly disappointed that she had failed once again to bust them.

"I won't stop. Never, never, never!" Candace said.

When everyone else moved away, Isabella sneaked back into the room with the time machine. She set it to return to the workshop a few minutes after she left. She pulled the handle and with an acrobatic leap got clear of the time-travel field before the machine vanished.

"Now my machine will be taken for his unfinished machine," she told herself. "Mr. Onassis left documents leaving it to science, so things will be more or less the same. It won't need as much fixing, that's all. Maybe it will need a little tuning after years of sitting unused. And once it goes to the prehistoric past it gets stepped on by a dinosaur, so that will be that."

She went off to join the boys in their plan to build the biggest wooden sailing ship ever. She hoped that everything would be stable now.

But it wasn't. Unknown to her, Xavier Onassis had put his working time machine into the hands of Future Candace.

* * *

It has been a wonderful day, the day they re-did the roller-coaster adventure as a musical. She wasn't quite sure how all the musical numbers had happened, but at the end the grand "Carpe Diem" finale faded away, leaving Phineas, Ferb, and Isabella alone in the yard.

Two identical women, one in a white lab coat, entered through the gate. They waited for the roller-coaster cars in the tree to explode, and laughed together about it.

"Wait, Candace, you're grown up. And there's two of you," Phineas said.

The two Candaces explained that they were from two alternate futures, one good and one terrible, but the latter had been fixed.

Phineas asked if the Candace from the bad future should disappear now that the bad future no longer existed. An instant later she did, and Isabella gave a little start of horror.

The remaining good-future Candace tried to explain further, but she seemed to be in shock and completely confused. "Guys, I need your help. The time machine I arrived in is smashed to pieces. I m stuck here, unless you guys can build me one."

Phineas asked Ferb about the time machine in the Museum of Natural History. Isabella's heart sank because that was the machine she had sent back into the past. There was no time machine left there any more, and it was all her fault.

Candace said, "Yes, that's the one you fix later this summer when we go to the museum. It's the one I took back from the future but now it's destroyed."

Isabella was surprised. Candace was talking like this was the first day of summer, and the trip to prehistoric times was in the future. She must have mistaken the date somehow.

Phineas seemed oblivious to this possibility, taking Candace's statement at face value that the time machine would need to be fixed again, then unfixed.

Isabella went with them to the museum, convinced she was going to have to help them build a whole new machine. But to her surprise there was a time machine there. As they checked it over to see if it needed repairs she found the hidden spatial controls that proved this was actually the Onassis time machine, not hers.

The Future Candaces had been confused about the machine, Isabella decided. They had traveled here separately. There were two temporal copies of the machine, just as there were two copies of Candace. Only one of the copies had been destroyed. The other was "raring to go."

"It was my letting Mr. Onassis complete his machine that made all this happen," Isabella thought. "A bad future had to be fixed, and one copy of Candace got destroyed, because of me."

At least this explained why the Future Candaces got the date wrong. Mr. Onassis had said the calibration was off for backward hops. This was really the only thing that needed fixing, and they fixed it.

They returned Future Candace to her good future and family, with a side trip the the antique store by young Candace to get the boys busted by their older mother.

Before they returned, Isabella had two more trips to make. It was up to her to set right what had once gone wrong. She would prevent the bad future and the death of Bad Future Candace entirely. She first went to the end of the day where Phineas and Ferb had finished using the wood-metal bonding tool to make a ship, and took it from their garage. Then she took the tool back to the beginning of the day. In both cases she used the spatial controls of the Onassis machine to make this possible.

"Ferb I know what we're going to do today," she heard Phineas say.

"No, you don't," Isabella said. "Here's the wood and steel fusing tool you need."

Phineas gratefully offered her a soda, which she happily took.

That accomplished, she went back to the future with the soda and all of them went home to the day of the second roller-coaster.

That night, Isabella was restless and worried. Hadn't she done the same thing as Bad Future Candace by undoing her own past? Was she going to pop out of existence? Or maybe a time wave would come along and reset her memories so that she no longer remembered the second set of time trips she no longer had to make. It didn't bear thinking about too hard. The more she thought about it the more likely she was to convince herself to no longer exist.

Isabella remembered the song. Whatever time there was left for her with Phineas, she needed to make the most of it.

Carpe Diem.


End file.
